Gottfried Helnwein's The Golden Age was a centerpiece of an exhibit that drew attention to a long career of subversive art. A novice to the milieu, I was there on the whim of a friend; I've recently discovered that indulging friends was proving even more treacherous than coping with fierce women. Yet I found consolodation in the fact that the Golden Age had me transfixed. It reminded me that the darkest of fantasies tread perilously close to our real lives, stalking them with dire warnings. In the picture a little girl gazes down upon her mother's thigh as though presiding over a very private, forbidden ritual.

Together they huddle in the dark, lovingly regarding sizeable hypodermic that the elder thirty-something is poised to inject into herself. She, meaning the woman, is loosely sexualized and on the edge of a belated maturity; The little girl, meanwhile, has somehow passed her by in this regard: and with preternatural agedness she looks beyond to some overhanging firmament.